How to Disappear(9)

“The job. Is it still open?”

“Don’t you want to know what it is first?” Then she smiles.

I want to trust her so much, it’s ridiculous. If I had my phone, I’d be typing in memos to self. Stop trusting people would top the list. Just after Hide.

“If it’s legal, I don’t care what it is.”

And the legal part is probably negotiable.

“Maid,” she says. “You work for tips. Still want it?” I’d nod if bending my head didn’t hurt. “We’re maybe a third full.” Which, given the lack of cars in the lot, might be an exaggeration. “But it’s better on weekends, parents visiting over at the college and such. And there’s a room—not much of a room, but it’s got TV.”

“Yes!” There are times when cleaning out toilets in Texas is right up there with a guided tour of heaven.

“I didn’t say you’re hired. You ever done any heavy cleaning?”

“Tons.”

She gives me a look.

I try again. “I really need this. Things didn’t work out with my boyfriend. As you can see. Please.” My voice catches from hearing myself say this out loud. “If I don’t get work, I’ll have to go back.”

“What did he do, break a chair over your head?”

I don’t even blink. “Biker.”

Any idea that I’m still a trying-to-be-honest, parties-yet-adheres-to-the-Ten-Commandments kind of girl is dead and buried in Ohio.

Luna nods with a look of lie-induced understanding. “You got ID?”

“I got out with what I had on.” Props for thinking on my feet if not for moral rectitude. “But I’m sure I could get ID—”

“How old?”

Twenty-one? Everyone who wants to drink says twenty-one. But I don’t want to seem like a high school kid either. A beat-up kid so young that a responsible motel clerk would call up the police so they could come right over.

“Nineteen?”

“What’s your name?”

Why, why, why hadn’t I thought of a name?

I’m staring straight out at the Jiffy Taco three-course Mex-Italian dinner advertised on an easel outside their front door. It’s a pizza pie made out of cheese and tortilla chips, with rice and beans.

I say, “Bean.” Bean? “Uh, it’s my nickname.” Bean???

For the rest of the day, Bean sits on the bed in the maid’s room at the Bluebonnet. Listening to the decrepit ice machine building up power to drop its jagged cubes into the metal tray, wheezing and rumbling until the ice clatters to rest.

Every time the ice drops, her heart stops.





10


Jack


When I pull into the cul-de-sac, the sun is setting purple, and the flames are out. The air is tinged with smoke, and there’s a light rain of ashes. Two fire trucks are blocking the driveway, an ambulance at the ready, lights flashing, in front of the house.

I leave the car in the middle of the street and sprint between the trucks.

My mother is standing in the front yard smiling, ridiculously calm. Her two settings are overly parental and ridiculously calm. Around my dad, the given was that he controlled everything. Once she got out from under his thumb and into the dullness of desert suburbia, her inner control freak was unleashed—largely on me.

She sees me coming and holds up her hand. “It was the clothes dryer. Lots of fuss about nothing.”

Three different firefighters and our next-door neighbor Mrs. Lasky say, “It wasn’t nothing.” The firefighters keep coming out of the side of the house wearing protective gear, carrying blackened objects to the sidewalk.

The image in my head is Don sneering at me. What I thought were empty, stupid words turn out to be this: someone set my house on fire.

As warnings go, it’s impressive. I’m warned. I want to grab my mom and hide her somewhere. Then I want to burn Don, and I want him to know it was me. I can tell myself, This isn’t who I am, a thousand times, but I still want to do it.

“Laundry rooms.” The firefighter shakes his head. You’d think that up and down the streets of Summerlin, Nevada, dryers were blowing up.

“Too much lint in the hose,” my mom says as if she believes it. “Probably. Did you know that smoke detector batteries can catch fire spontaneously?”

Sure they can. I ask the firefighter, “Can you check this out? Can you find out what the problem was?”

Because there’s no way there was too much lint in that hose unless someone doused it with accelerant and stuffed it in there. This was all set up and ready to launch if I turned down Don.

Someone did this.

I try to calculate how hard it was to make this happen. What skills were required to walk past three Rottweilers and the motion sensors undetected and make a dryer ignite like clockwork when I was driving through the desert, halfway between saying no to Don and pulling into my driveway? This has strategy, planning, and execution so far above Don’s pay grade, it’s mind-blowing.

This demonstrates what I grew up knowing: you can get to anyone, anywhere, anytime if you know what you’re doing.

“It’s not the end of the world, Jack!” my mother says. “You should see your face. If the worst thing that happens to me in my life is I get singed hair, I’m doing fine!”